ARCHIVED: What is Cray LibSci, and where is it installed at IU?

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The Cray Scientific Libraries (LibSci) package is a collection of numerical routines optimized for performance on Cray supercomputers.

Most LibSci components contain both single-processor and parallel routines optimized for Cray processors and interconnect architectures. The general components of Cray LibSci are:

  • BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines)
  • CBLAS (C interface to the legacy BLAS)
  • BLACS (Basic Linear Algebra Communication Subprograms)
  • LAPACK (Linear Algebra Package)
  • ScaLAPACK (Scalable Linear Algebra Package)

At Indiana University, the Cray LibSci routines are available on Big Red II. They are loaded by default in all programming environments (Cray, GNU, Intel, and PGI). No flags or options are needed for compiling or linking as long as you use the Cray compiler driver commands (cc, CC, and ftn).

Additionally, accelerated BLAS and LAPACK routines for generating and executing GPU kernels on Big Red II's CPU/GPU nodes are available when you load the cray-libsci_acc module. For applications using BLAS or LAPACK, and compiled with the Cray, GNU, or PGI compilers, Cray Libsci will automatically load and link the accelerated libraries if it determines performance will be significantly enhanced by executing computations on the GPU. Each accelerated routine can be invoked manually, as well.

If you have questions or need help using the Cray LibSci routines on Big Red II, email the UITS Scientific Applications and Performance Tuning (SciAPT) team.

This is document ayji in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2023-04-21 16:58:04.